Biography

J S Kingfisher

J S Kingfisher – Jeff – is a songwriter and recording artist, arranger and producer, composer for film and orchestra, instrumentalist, and vocalist. He is the creator of Muzoracle, a tool for engaging the intuition and imagination through music and story; and Swenakilo, the sound immersion practice that engages with it. He is the composer, arranger, and producer of From the Moon to the Earth, a 21-piece song cycle and 2-disc set featuring 26 of LA's top vocalists and session players (2016); Vesica Piscis (1998); and Floating Upstream (1993.) He is also the creator of Muzundrum, a musician's game of chance and skill, and the Musician's Dice, a composing, improvising, and educational tool.

In 2002, Jeff founded Philomuse, a record label, production company, and the manufacturer of his innovations. In 2016, he opened Philomusica, his current musical home in the Coachella Valley (yes, that Coachella.)

Jeff’s music covers a broad range of styles, and his new work is being released as singles in open ended projects: “Memoirs in Acoustic” is underway, as is ambient collection called "Las Californias." He releases a piece from one or another every full moon or so. Jeff is also finishing production on Serbian singer Dalibor Banović's new album, and playing keys and cowriting with the eclectic pop rock project Alphanaut.

Early YearsJeff was born and raised in Sacramento, California. Musically, he was influenced early on by the big band and country swing records of his parents, and by the records passed on to him by his older cousins: Meet the Beatles and Rubber Soul, the Stones' Aftermath, Cream's Disraeli Gears, lots of Janis and Motown, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. His high school years found him heavy into Bowie and glam with the shoes to prove it; in the meantime he discovered fusion, Joni, and THC. Jeff started playing piano and writing songs himself at age 12, and studied organ and classical theory throughout his teens.

Jeff's first professional gig was as a pianist for the notorious Lee Garland Show, a raucous and bawdy review featuring Garland's female impersonations, comedy, and dancers. Throughout his early twenties he played in numerous rock bands, and in the early eighties moved to LA. There he attended the Dick Grove School of Music for two years, studying piano, composition, and arranging; it was there he began to seriously sink his teeth into jazz and develop his compositional style of writing and playing. Jeff's next half-dozen years were spent arranging, producing, and playing sessions of all sorts, mostly from his Hollywood studio, Electric Cat. Meanwhile he continued working on his own stuff, and in the early nineties moved up to Northern Cal and began writing the material that would later become Floating Upstream.Jeff worked throughout the nineties on several multimedia projects, composing for the theatrical productions Both Hands, Kelly's Dream in the Rain, and finally Unity Gain, a Bay Area production based on Floating Upstream that included several musicians and movement artists floating behind a sixty-foot wide projection surface. The new millienium found him back in Southern California, where as of this writing he remains.Personal Notes

Jeff's music, writing, and art is influenced and inspired by an ongoing passion for the "big questions": he is an intrepid explorer of esoteric music theory, myth and meaning, the mystic approach, and the work of G.I. Gurdjieff. He is a voracious reader of both fiction and non, a film buff, a San Francisco Giants and Novak Djoković fan, and a coffee snob; in the middle of all that he tries to get outdoors as much as possible. He lives in Palm Desert with his husband, father, and dogs Barney and Fred.

HOT OFF THE PRESS

2nd edition of Muzoracle released and available at last! Discover Swenakilo sound immersion with JSK at his studio—crystal custom tuned to the Telluspheric Tuning Matrix, jaaaa! New release from "Memoirs in Acoustic" project: Letter from Love. New singles from Alphanaut, World on Fire and Look to the Future, recorded and mixed by JSK at Philomusica!